Indiana University Press Rights Guide Autumn/Winter 2025
Indiana University Press is proud to be celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2025! For three-quarters of a century, we have been publishing distinguished scholarship and creative works, and we are excited to mark this milestone by expanding the reach of our titles through rights and licensing partnerships worldwide. We invite you to join us in celebrating this anniversary year by exploring opportunities to bring our books to new audiences.
If you are interested in licensing rights to Indiana University Press titles—including translation, audio, digital, or other formats—please contact us at permiss@iu.edu. Subject to availability, we can provide a PDF for review purposes. Please note that it is our policy not to grant exclusive options.
A complete index of our publications, along with catalogs organized by subject, can be found at: https://iupress.org/books/.
Please feel welcome to contact us with any questions about our titles—we look forward to hearing from you!
With best wishes,
Heather Lengyel Rights & Permissions Manager hlengyel@iu.edu permiss@iu.edu
Biafra
A MILITARY HISTORY
ROY DORON , CD Spangler Distinguished
Professor of African and African American History, Winston-Salem State University
SEPTEMBER 2025
356 PAGES • 6.125 X 9.25 • 6 MAPS World rights, all languages
The Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), also known as the Biafran War, remains one of the most politically charged and divisive issues in contemporary Nigerian politics. During its three years of violence, the war resulted in an astonishing number of deaths. This included civilians who suffered starvation due to the siege, which ultimately ended with no victors.
Biafra discusses the major political, military, and diplomatic factors that came to play in the war, as well as the matters of genocide, humanitarian relief, and the memory of Biafra. Doron delineates the war’s operational history, from its origins to its military engagements, failures in leadership, international reactions, and its resolution and legacy. Biafra also examines how the country was affected after the war, when Nigeria’s military government imposed a “no victors, no vanquished” policy to minimize further conflict and promote national unity.
Providing the first comprehensive narrative history of the Nigerian Civil War in more than 50 years, Biafra offers a new basis for scholars and readers to understand one of postcolonial Africa’s most devastating and consequential conflicts.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Formation of Nigeria
2. Coup, Countercoup, and Secession
3. The War Begins
4. The Midwest Offensive and the Transformation of the War
5. The World Reacts
6. Genocide
7. Biafra and Nigeria’s Second Military Collapse and Peace Talks
8. Biafra’s Collapse and Rebirth
9. The End (?) of Biafra Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
From AIDS to Population Health
HOW AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY AND A KENYAN MEDICAL SCHOOL TRANSFORMED HEALTHCARE IN EAST AFRICA
JAMES D. KELLY , Associate Professor and Director of Journalism, Indiana University
2025
224 PAGES • 11 X 10 • 97 COLOR ILLUS. World rights, all languages
From AIDS to Population Health explores the thirty-year history of a unique collaboration between the medical schools of Indiana University and Moi University in Kenya, as it progressed from combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in East Africa to the building of a national plan to provide universal healthcare to all. The Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) program focuses on the medical education of healthcare professionals who are building communities that can take care of themselves.
The overwhelming success of the AMPATH program and its continuing vibrant legacy today are showcased through dozens of striking photographs, telling interviews, and revealing anecdotes and encounters. It focuses on four of the most innovative projects among the fifty that AMPATH oversees: a microfinance officer who organizes villagers, an oncology nurse who runs outreach clinics, a farm extension agent working in partnership with a multinational agriculture corporation to improve farm output, and a special healthcare clinic exclusively for adolescents.
Over its thirty-year history, AMPATH has served more than a million clients and trained 2,600 medical professionals and community health workers, always guided by its motto “Leading with Care.” From AIDS to Population Health presents their compelling stories and explores the program’s continuing legacy for the first time.
Philosophies of Justice in Acholi
RESPONSIBILITY IN TIMES OF COLLECTIVE SUFFERING
BENEDETTA LANFRANCHI , Adjunct Assistant Professor, American University of Rome
SEPTEMBER 2025
138 PAGES • 5.5 X 8.5
World rights, all languages
Since 2008 Ugandans residing in the northern region of Acholiland have been faced with the uncertainties of justice stemming from the twenty-year civil war waged between the Ugandan government and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Seeking accountability and reconciliation within their communities, Acholi and non-Acholi have had to grapple with large-scale practical and philosophical questions: Whose legal system should deliver justice for victims, and what are the aims and responsibilities of justice as a concept?
Philosophies of Justice in Acholi focuses on Acholi traditional mechanisms of justice (ATJMs), which became the central framework for jurisprudence outlined in the peace agreements that were brokered from 2006 to 2008. Framing community members’ responsibilities in terms of their ancestral beings has facilitated a justice process that understands the inseparable relations between individuals and groups and thus provides pathways to reclaim social, moral, and material lives. While ATJMs have thus far fallen short of addressing national and global polities’ responsibilities in the conflict, their core premises hold promise for defining Uganda’s still-developing political justice process and for humans everywhere seeking justice. Delving into understandings of fairness, responsibility, and group identity, Philosophies of Justice in Acholi reveals that justice, and its effect on collective existence, is always political.
Worlding Home
AN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY OF PEACEKEEPING CAMPS IN GOMA, DRC
MAREN LARSEN , Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies, University of Basel
OCTOBER 2025
274 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 23 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Worlding Home interrogates the social, spatial, and architectural lifeworlds of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers accommodated in contingent camps throughout Goma, the capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Repub-lic of the Congo. From 2017 to 2019, more than twenty of these camps existed in and around the city, operating as sites of global outreach even as they generated new ways of being at home for peacekeepers and the peace-kept population. Through multisited ethnography and deep engagement with anthropological and urban theory, Larsen explores the entanglements of camp and city. Pushing against readings of Goma’s peacekeeping camps as either more privileged enclaves or as outliers in camp studies when compared to refugee camps, Larsen argues for an understanding of “camp” as a process and practice. Between dwelling and journeying and “here” and “there,” the everyday lives and embodied practices of Goma’s peacekeepers and Congolese civilians co-construct a “city as elsewhere” in which camping is a vital urban practice.
By offering a more expansive understanding of how UN peacekeeping camps fit within Goma’s urban fabric, Worlding Home reveals the intertwined sociospatial processes of making a home, building a city, and reimagining the world.
“By considering the camp as a social and urban formation, Larsen’s fine-grained ethnography offers a key reading for scholars interested in the complex geographies of encampment and urbanity in the context of global humanitarianism.”
Timothy Raeymaekers, author of The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean
“This beautifully written book contributes to and challenges efforts to reformulate global urban studies through a lively, engaged ethnography of placemaking among Global South peacekeepers.”
Garth Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South
Water into Bones
BIRTH RITUALS, ANCESTORS, AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN NORTHERN MADAGASCAR
ERIN K. NOURSE , Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Regis University
2025 288 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 24 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Water into Bones is an ethnographic exploration of the religious practices around birthing and infant care in northern Madagascar. The book highlights the processes by which Malagasy “instill bones” in the newly born by way of haircutting ceremonies, rituals of baptism and circumcision, and the use of “growth medicines” (aody be), teething necklaces, and special jewelries meant to embed the newly born in the powerful legacies of their ancestors. Nourse investigates how Malagasy women adhere to ancestral practices and engage with religion around moments of birth in the port city of Diégo Suarez. The people of northern Madagascar have incorporated a plethora of ancestries, ethnicities, and religious practices into their own, sometimes celebrating the hybridity that is their history while also performing rituals and traditions that set groups apart and create distinctive identities. Through women’s stories, Water into Bones weaves together a retelling of this history—the traditions that East African, Arab, and Asian migrants brought to the island over the last two millennia; the colonial and postcolonial contexts that shape hybridized religious and lineage-based identities; and the ritual innovations of young Malagasy today whose customs are at once a nod to the ancestors and also, sometimes, a severing of ties with the ancestors as a result of newer Pentecostal and Charismatic religious worldviews.
Water into Bones reveals the vast possibilities for creating community, identity, and sacred power through the personal experiences of northern Malagasy women during pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Studying Birth Rituals and Ancestors in Madagascar
1. Birthing Babies in Diégo Suarez
2. Motherhood and Creative Confluences of Care
3. Bathing and Seclusion: Making Mothers Who Will Bless Their Babies
4. Turning “Water Babies” into “Real Human Beings”
5. Bearing Babies in Dynamic Religious Landscapes
Conclusion: Birth, Loss, and Competing Moral Cosmologies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey
PORTRAITS OF WEST AFRICAN GIRLHOOD, 1720 – 1940
JESSICA CATHERINE REUTHER , Assistant Professor of History, Ball State University
2025
280 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 10 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
From the 1720s to the 1940s, families in Dahomey (now Benin) commonly practiced girl fostering, or “entrusting,” sending daughters into foster homes to build networks of kinship, caregiving, and mutual obligation—while also exploiting girls’ labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers.
Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls’ lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing these girls and their social mothers at the center of history brings to light their core contributions to local and global political economies, even as the Dahomean monarchy, global trade, and colonial courts reshaped girlhood norms and fostering practices. Reuther reveals that the social, economic, and political changes wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century; the shift to “legitimate” trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth century; and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered—and were altered by—the intimate practice of entrusting female children between households. Dahomeans also valorized this process as a crucial component of being “well-raised”—a sentiment that continues into the present, despite widespread Beninese opposition to modern-day forms of child labor.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Portrait of a Girl and a Fabric Seller
1. The Value of Girls to the Royal Household of Dahomey, 1720s–1870s
2. Dashing and Entrusting Girls: The Atlanticization of Child Circulation during the Reigns of Kings Gezo and Glèlè, 1818–1889
3. Agbessipé and Her Mother: Female Wealth, Girl Pawns, and Enslaved Labor in Ouidah during the Era of “Legitimate” Trade, 1840s–1880s
4. A Runaway Girl amidst the Turmoil of Conquest: Household Economies and Colonial Transformations in the Kingdoms of Hogbonou and Dahomey, 1880s–1890s
5. Entrusted or Enslaved? Colonial Legal Debates about Girls’ Statuses, 1900s–1930s
6. “Why Did You Not Cry Out . . . ?”: Sexual Assaults of Entrusted Girls in Colonial Dahomey, 1917–1941
7. The Télé Affair (1936–1938): Anxieties about Transformations in Girlhood in Colonial Abomey
Conclusion: Obscured Histories of Girlhood
Glossary of Foreign Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Teraanga Republic
WOMEN’S AUTHORITY AND POLITICS IN SENEGAL
EMILY JENAN RILEY , Associate Professor and Researcher, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México
2025
294 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 16 B&W ILLUS. • 1 MAP
World rights, all languages except Spanish
In Teraanga Republic, Riley unveils the importance of women’s patronage politics in a Muslim-majority Senegal expressed through teraanga—a pivotal concept in the Wolof language referencing hospitality, generosity, and honor. Riley challenges perceptions of governance, gender and politics, authority, and religion on a global scale, revealing the interconnectedness of republican, Indigenous, and Islamic ways of enacting politics. Teraanga Republic delves into how the women who fought for equal political representation have transformed their private expressions of teraanga and piety into public governance strategies.
This rich ethnography provides an intimate look at the lives and careers of several prominent Senegalese women politicians—including a former prime minister, a justice minister, and parliamentarians—who make up one of the highest numbers of women in elected politics in the world. These women politicians derive their authority in state politics by seamlessly blending public political gestures with private acts of belonging and reciprocity, challenging the borders between state and private forms of governance and wealth distribution. In turn, their female patrons benefit socially and economically by creating solidarity groups, microenterprises, and associations with women political leaders.
Bringing readers into the lived spaces of Senegalese politics, Teraanga Republic demonstrates that with the emergence of a new elite class of women politicians also comes new considerations for what women envision for themselves and their communities.
“Teraanga Republic is an important and fascinating demonstration of the significance of local traditions in contemporary African politics.”
Fallou Ngom, Boston University
The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa
NIKOLAS SWEET , Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Wyoming
In recent years, migration across urban centers and national borders has radically reshaped West African societies and sparked a global debate on the legal and cultural processes of immigration. Along newly constructed international highways in southeastern Senegal, young men and women travel between regional centers and their hometowns in the wake of a gold-mining boom that has brought new opportunities as well as risks. Previous scholarship on migration has often emphasized the movement of bodies and things. In The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa, instead of considering language primarily as a way to describe mobility as it happened, Sweet positions language as an essential infrastructure through which individuals forge material connections and communication channels across space and borders. This reinterpretation of migration emphasizes that language is a form of social action in its own right—one that does not merely reflect experiences in the world but can bring things into being. Mobility emerges not only from an individual’s given mobile history, but also through an attention to the linguistic resources deployed in everyday interactions with others.
Based on ethnographic research on social interaction, verbal creativity, and mobility in southeastern Senegal, The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa reveals how migrants use language to build social networks and mitigate risk amid socioeconomic and environmental precarity.
“This gorgeous ethnography of borderlands, migration, and belonging in West Africa demonstrates the key role of language as infrastructure for and articulation of mobility.”
Kristina Wirtz, author of Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History
“A compelling study of the arts of talk and how they enable people to move around through meaningful places and relationships.”
Judith T. Irvine, author of Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life
Pathways to Utopia
TIME AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE LANDLESS WORKERS MOVEMENT OF BRAZIL
ALEX UNGPRATEEB FLYNN , Associate Professor of Art and Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
260 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 16 B&W ILLUS. • 2 MAPS World rights, all languages except Portuguese
Pathways to Utopia explores how Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), against all odds, has endured for forty years as one of the world’s largest social movements— while transforming the way we understand the temporality of activism. Taking his cue from MST members and their generational struggle for land and justice, anthropologist Flynn reveals how the movement’s longevity stems not only from its strong organization and collective vision but also from the productive tensions between established utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices. Perceived by some as a shortcoming, this friction has proven to be a generative force, sparking creative gestures that reimagine social relations and ensuring the MST’s adaptability in an ever-changing political landscape.
Flynn chronicles the everyday lives of families navigating an extraordinary political reality over a fifteen-year period. At the heart of Pathways to Utopia is the realization that activism is not a momentary act but an ongoing, relational practice—one where even the smallest community actions reverberate, reshaping the very structures through which people seek to change the world.
Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, the book illuminates the dreams and sacrifices that characterize a life lived as struggle. Unfolding across multiple points of time, Pathways to Utopia tells a story of hope and resilience— one that promises a lasting influence on our twenty-firstcentury political imagination.
“Beautifully written . . . Flynn’s love for the people and the places and the cause shines through. His writing style and long-standing commitment together make this an extremely compelling read.”
Wendy Wolford, author of This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil
“Flynn’s book has the rare quality of combining rigorous scholarship with literary writing to exquisitely analyze how the longest social movement has been imagining an alternative collective future for the past 40 years.”
Eduardo Dullo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul “With its vibrant detail and analytical clarity, this book gives us the tools to understand how long-term social and political change occurs from below through the creation of conflict and contradiction. Anyone interested in understanding social change—and how it might be achieved—should study this book.”
Marianne Maeckelbergh, author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy
Intimacies of Global Sufism
NE’MATULLAHI SHRINES AND MATERIAL CULTURE
BETWEEN IRAN AND INDIA
PEYVAND FIROUZEH , Lecturer in Islamic Art, University of Sydney
NOVEMBER 2025
260 PAGES • 8.5 X 11 • 144 COLOR ILLUS.
• 5 LINE DRAWINGS • 3 MAPS • 4 CHARTS World rights, all languages
From the fifteenth-century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne’matullah Vali navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India, acting as agents of power, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that engaged local audiences, invoked distant places, and brought together pilgrims, itinerant artists, merchants, and courtiers from many regions.
Pushing back against global art history trajectories that have privileged east-west connections as well as studies of Islamic art in South Asia that have largely focused on the Mughal Empire, Intimacies of Global Sufism explores the opportunities and challenges that Sufis encountered in developing a transregional network of material culture. Using the concept of intimacy to highlight the shrines’ affective interconnections between people, objects, and ideas, Firouzeh invites readers to step inside these significant but understudied sacred spaces and rethink their wider religious and material significance. Looking closely at sites ranging across thousands of kilometers, this book combines a detailed analysis of architecture, objects of ritual, and manuscripts, with local and dynastic histories, Sufi poems, patronage documents, and a unique focus on the disciple-artists who created these spaces. Moving between small spaces and global perspectives allows us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory sides of Sufi material culture: its tendency toward asceticism, and its investment in monuments and transregional connections.
Richly illustrated with more than 140 images of these sites, their architecture, and their artifacts, Intimacies of Global Sufism offers readers a new vantage point on the early modern world and the making of transregional community through sacred spaces.
“In this book, Peyvand Firouzeh brilliantly shows how close readings of individual Nematullahi Sufi shrines and artworks can enrich broader conversations happening in the field of art history.”
Deborah Hutton, author of The History of Asian Art: A Global View
Quilt Arts of South Africa
THREADED LEGACIES
EDITED BY MARSHA MACDOWELL ,
Professor of Art, Art History, and Design, Michigan State University; Curator, Michigan State University Museum; Director, Quilt Index
2025
250 PAGES • 8.5 X 11 • 124 COLOR ILLUS. World rights, all languages
In the southernmost region of the African continent, women have been piecing together materials—textile construction techniques commonly used in quilting— to create bed coverings throughout the history of the San and Khoi peoples. From the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, an influx of Dutch, French, Indian, and British military personnel, traders, miners, and missionaries came to South Africa, bringing with them their own cultural traditions, including making and using quilts. Today, the making of quilts in South Africa is flourishing.
Quilt Arts of South Africa stitches together the history, production, and significance of quilt making from its earliest appearance in the continent’s southernmost region to the twenty-first century. With input from curators, linguists, art historians, activist artists, and folklorists, this book presents disparate yet connected inquiries into a wide-ranging history of the quilt. These perspectives connect a rich expressive art to place, showing how the quilting traditions in South Africa together reflect a unique cultural history and natural landscape.
Itself pieced together from diverse voices, Quilt Arts of South Africa offers glimpses into the histories and meanings of quilting in South Africa.
“An engaging rediscovery of a key art form and practice, much of which is shrouded in, and grounded in, South Africa’s political background. This is another way of rewriting history through the art practices of primarily women, in this case.”
Kate Wells, author of Fabric Dyeing and Printing
“This is a well-researched publication that innovatively focuses on different areas of South African history through quilt and textile art produced by local artists. A great read and a musthave for one’s book collection.”
Nelisiwe Mkhize, Director, William Humphreys Art Gallery
“[A] groundbreaking volume that offers never-before-seen information and perspectives about the quilt-making history, traditions, aesthetics, cultures, and artists of South Africa. Readers will find insights about the diversity and richness of South African quilting practices written by an international group of multidisciplinary scholars. As an artist scholar, it is a volume to which I will return many times.”
—Diana Baird N’Diaye, Creative Director, African American Craft Alliance
Garden Exotica
INTERNATIONAL PLANTBASED FUSION CUISINE
BABITA SHRESTHA , Plant-Based Chef, Photographer, Graphic Designer, and Author of Plant-Based Himalaya
NOVEMBER 2025
176 PAGES • 8 X 10 • 100 COLOR ILLUS. World rights except Nepal, all languages
Take a culinary journey to new destinations, right from the comfort of your own kitchen. Garden Exotica is your passport to a world of vibrant, plant-based flavors that will transport you somewhere exotic.
In Garden Exotica, the long-awaited follow-up to PlantBased Himalaya, Shrestha shares 61 meticulously crafted recipes that celebrate the diversity of international cuisines that nourish your body and soul with wholesome, home-cooked meals. Sharing her favorite recipes from all over the world, including Nepal, India, Turkey, Japan, Greece, Jamaica, Morocco, Italy, and Mexico, Shrestha will leave your taste buds wanting more.
Garden Exotica will take your everyday kitchen ingredients and transform your weeknight meal into something extraordinary!
“Garden Exotica is a treasury of culinary delights, with recipes that are wonderfully healthful, beautiful, and delicious.”
Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, president and founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
“Babita offers a delicious and inspiring culinary journey to create joyous meals with ease—I can’t wait to enjoy diverse, nourishing flavors in this beautiful book.”
Ozlem Warren, award-winning Turkish food writer and author of SEBZE and Özlem’s Turkish Table
“In Garden Exotica, Babita Shrestha presents a lovely collection of recipes reflective of how plant-based cuisine has evolved deliciously over time and across continents.”
Sheil Shukla, author of Plant-Based India
“Cooking with love and plants creates magic on the plate. This cookbook reflects the heart of a passionate cook and the richness of vegan flavors from Nepal. A true gift for anyone who loves good food.”
Santosh Shah, chef and author of Ayla
The Youngest Yugoslavs
AN ORAL HISTORY OF POSTSOCIALIST MEMORY
JOVANA BABOVIĆ , Associate Professor of History, State University of New York at Geneseo
NOVEMBER 2025
266 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 5 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Reflecting on the final decades of socialism, eight individuals born in former Yugoslavia between 1971 and 1991 recount their memories of childhood and early adulthood, and how that time period has made a lasting impact on their lives.
The Youngest Yugoslavs is an oral history collection that gives its readers in-depth, varied perspectives on why Yugoslavia continues to resonate among its former citizens more than 30 years since the state collapsed amid war, genocide, and dislocation. Their interviews with Babović showcase how these individuals remember their childhoods during the final decades of socialism and how they conceptualize the lasting impact Yugoslavia has had on their lives.
The Youngest Yugoslavs offers insight on how this generation of Yugoslav individuals have reconciled the loss of their homeland and how they have continued to find meaning in the Yugoslav past as both a lived experience and as a set of ideals.
Caring Like a State
THE POLITICS OF RUSSIA’S DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS
INNA LEYKIN , Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication, The Open University of Israel
SEPTEMBER 2025
250 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 4 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages except Russian
The post-Soviet Russian state is haunted by the fear of not having enough people. Despite its well-publicized pronatalist campaigns, declining birth rates and rising mortality rates since the 1990s, cast doubt on the state’s ability to care for its population effectively. In this ethnography, anthropologist Leykin examines the post-Soviet Russian state’s efforts and failures in population care. Revealing the existential burden of pronatalism, she demonstrates how the language of demography has become influential in defining what kind of behavior and social aspirations are deemed worthy of state support and protection.
Caring Like a State: The Politics of Russia’s Demographic Crisis analyzes the professional world of demographers, non-state actors, and the subjective experiences of ordinary Russian citizens to explore how their reciprocal relations have shaped the dominant understanding of population issues and their remedies.
“This is an essential—and unsettling—book for our troubled political moment.”
Olga Shevchenko, author of Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow
“In her fascinating book, Caring Like a State, anthropologist Inna Leykin offers a pioneering political ethnography, shedding important new light on the centrality of issues of low fertility, high mortality, and migration in Russian politics past and present. A book to be enjoyed and to learn from.”
David Kertzer, author of The Pope at War
“[A] significant and unique study that examines the logics and practices surrounding Russia’s long-perceived demographic crisis . . . This book will make a major contribution to both the study of Russia and our understandings of the political and social work of demographic knowledge and politics in the contemporary world.”
Michele Rivkin-Fish, author of Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics
Anastas Mikoyan
AN
ARMENIAN REFORMER IN KHRUSHCHEV’S KREMLIN
PIETRO A. SHAKARIAN , Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Historical Research, National Research University–Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia
266 PAGES • 6.125 X 9.25 • 24 B&W ILLUS.
• 1 MAP
World rights, all languages
Rights sold: Armenian
Veteran Soviet statesman and longtime Politburo member Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan is perhaps best remembered in both the West and the post-Soviet space as a master political survivor who weathered every Soviet leader from Lenin to Brezhnev. Less well known is the pivotal role that Mikoyan played in dismantling and rejecting the Stalinist legacy and guiding Khrushchev’s nationality policy toward greater decentralization and cultural expression for nationalities.
Based on new discoveries from the Russian and Armenian archives, Anastas Mikoyan is the first major biographical study in English of a key figure in Soviet politics. The book focuses on the Armenian statesman’s role as a reformer during the Thaw of 1953–1964, when Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s ascension opened the door to greater pluralism and democratization in the Soviet Union. Mikoyan had been a loyal Stalinist, but his background as a native Armenian guided his Thaw-era reform initiatives on nationality policy and de-Stalinization. The statesman advocated a dynamic approach to governance, rejecting national nihilism and embracing a multitude of ethnicities under the aegis of “socialist democracy,” using Armenia as his exemplar. While the Soviet government adopted most of Mikoyan’s recommendations, Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 ended the prospects for political change and led to Mikoyan’s own resignation the following year. Nevertheless, Mikoyan remained a prominent public figure until his death in 1978.
Following a storied statesman through his personal and professional connections within and beyond the Soviet state, Anastas Mikoyan offers important insights into nation-building, the politics of difference, and the lingering possibilities of political reform in the USSR.
“Shakarian’s study reflects a significant amount of scientific work. Especially noteworthy is his ability to analyze historical events and personae in a context that was constantly changing throughout the lifetime of Anastas Mikoyan. His work with sources is particularly impressive.”
Mark Grigorian, author of Yerevan: Biography of a City
“This splendid piece of research and writing deals with important issues that have not been adequately explored before in historical scholarship. The archival revelations are stunning, and Shakarian brings new light to obscured topics… . Well-organized, readable, and never verbose, it is a muchneeded and original contribution to the field of Soviet studies.”
Ronald Grigor Suny, author of Stalin: Passage to Revolution 2025
Caught in the Crosshairs
FEMINIST COMEDIANS AND THE CULTURE WARS
AMBER DAY , Professor of Media and Performance Studies: Chair, History, Literature, and the Arts Department, Bryant University
2025
150 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 8 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope.
Caught in the Crosshairs delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, who should be in the intended audience, what is appropriate behavior for which performing bodies, and what the boundaries of comedy ultimately are.
Caught in the Crosshairs is an examination of how feminist comedy reflects the tensions of our times, disrupting established narratives and challenging traditional power structures.
“In this most necessary book, Amber Day demolishes the myth that women can’t be funny. But more importantly, she helps us understand why too many people struggle to make sense of funny women, and why the debate around female comedy matters so much in our complicated cultural times.”
Geoffrey Baym, author of From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News
“Day dives into the heart of contemporary cultural ruptures with clarity and nuance … . Essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and comedy fans alike.”
Beck Krefting, author of All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents
African Energy Worlds in Film and Media
CARMELA GARRITANO , Associate Professor, Department of International Affairs; Affiliated Faculty, Africana Studies Program, Texas A&M University
2025
210 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 11 COLOR ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Can you imagine a post-petroleum world? African Energy Worlds in Film and Media joins energy humanists committed to undoing our deep dependence on fossil fuels and advancing equitable energy transitions by advancing this vision with a spotlight on African perspectives.
African cinema is a rich and varied medium for investigating the entanglements and social embeddedness of energy with global modernity and for imagining a world that leaves fossil fuels behind for unrealized green energy futures. African Energy Worlds in Film and Media shows us how African cinema makes sensible the energetic aspects of life in the ecological mesh that is planet Earth and grounds us in the everyday of the postcolonial, bringing attention to the enduring legacies of racism and colonialism that unevenly distribute energy-related violence and risk and amplifying Africans’ demands for access to the energy networks that undergird modernity. With a focus on feature, documentary, and arthouse films, including canonical films by Ousmane Sembène and Djbril Diop Mambety and new work by emergent directors Nelson Makengo and Djo Tunda Wa Munga, Garritano examines how these stories depict an array of energy sources from mineral extraction to wind and the by-products of these energy processes, like plastic and electronic waste.
Situated at the intersection of film studies, African studies, and energy humanities, African Energy Worlds in Film and Media analyzes the political, social, and economic dimensions of global energy forms and systems as represented in African cinema.
“African Energy Worlds is an inspired and inspirational study of the imbrications of energy and film in Africa. … it breaks new grounds in African film and media studies and the energy and environmental humanities.”
Cajetan Iheka, author of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics
A highly readable and necessary book, brimming with important insights for advocates for energy and climate justice as well as scholars in African and film studies and environmental and energy humanities.”
Jennifer Wenzel, author of The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
When Comedy Goes Wrong
CHRISTOPHER J. GILBERT , Associate Professor of English, Assumption University
244 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 7 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
While conventional wisdom has it that humor embodies a spirit of renewal and humility, a dispirited form of comedy thrives in a media-saturated and politically charged environment.
When Comedy Goes Wrong examines how, beginning in the late-twentieth and carrying into the early twentyfirst century, a certain comic dispirit found various platforms for disheartening cultural politics. From the calculated follies on talk radio programs like the The Rush Limbaugh Show through the charades of “cancel culture” and ultimately to so-called Alt-Right comedy, the transgressions, improprieties, and ego trips endemic to a newfangled comic freedom produced entirely unfunny ways of being. To understand these unfunny ways, Gilbert challenges the prevailing belief in humor’s goodness, analyzing radio personalities, meme culture, films, civil unrest, and even the language of ordinary individuals and everyday speech, all to demonstrate what happens when humor becomes humorless. As such, Gilbert imagines a nuanced sense of humor for a tumultuous world.
Ultimately, When Comedy Goes Wrong transcends partisanship to explore the uglier parts of American culture, imagining the stakes of doing comedy—and being comical—as a means of survival.
“Brilliantly argued and deeply relevant, Gilbert tackles the darker underbelly of comedy—the kind that aspires not merely to raze the roof but to burn it all down … a compelling critique of how comedic forms and exchanges can distort, if not altogether compromise, democratic ideals. This book is a highly readable and thought-provoking examination of how laughter can unite in order to divide, challenging readers to reconsider the redemptive power and responsibility of the comic voice in the modern world.”
Beck Krefting, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning, Skidmore College; author of All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents
Queer Slashers
PETER MARRA , Assistant Professor, Teaching in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Wayne State University
2025
238 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 19 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
From Norman Bates dressed as “Mother” in Psycho to the rouged cheeks of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, many slasher icons have borne traces of queer and gender nonconforming behavior since the subgenre’s very beginning.
Queer Slashers presents the first book-length study of how and why the slasher subgenre of horror films appeals to queer audiences. In it, Marra constructs a reparative history of the slasher that affirms its queer lineage extending back as early as the 1920s. It also articulates the queer aspects of the slasher formula that forge an unlikely kinship between queer audiences and these retrograde depictions of queer killers. Marra establishes a queer history and function for the slasher, analyzing several key contemporary “queer slashers”—that is, slashers that are made by queer filmmakers—to better understand how queer artists take up the slasher iconography and put it toward modern queer aims.
Featuring analysis of films such as John Waters’s Serial Mom, Peaches Christ’s All About Evil, and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, Queer Slashers illuminates the queer meanings of slashers, their foundations, and their future possibilities.
“An important contribution to the growing field of queer horror studies, this volume will be of interest to scholars and fans alike.”
Harry M. Benshoff, author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film
The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa
JAMES NAREMORE , Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus, English, Comparative Literature, and Media School, Indiana University; & DARLENE J. SADLIER , Professor Emerita, Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University
For over three decades, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been widely admired for his unusual and innovative body of work, which has earned accolades and wide acclaim.
The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa is the most complete treatment of his work, exploring Costa’s feature films from Blood to Vitalina Varela, and from the documentaries to the short films, museum exhibitions, and the forthcoming Daughters of Fire. Naremore and Sadlier situate Costa within the history and culture of Portugal, at the same time providing insightful close readings and stylistic analysis of the films. Their work explores the unusual features of his artistry and illuminates his unique contribution to cinema.
An accessible portrait of an important artist, The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa is an indispensable companion for scholars, students, and cinephiles everywhere.
“There is no one better than James Naremore, in collaboration here with Darlene J. Sadlier, to define and explore the enigmatic artistry of Pedro Costa, the neorealist Rembrandt of Portuguese and world cinema. The authors deliver elegant prose, dry wit, searching analysis of style and substance, and an unsurpassed command of film understanding.”
Patrick McGilligan, author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
“In nuanced and richly informed analyses, James Naremore and Darlene J. Sadlier illuminate all aspects of Pedro Costa’s films, proving especially insightful on atmosphere, performance, and gesture. As they write of Costa’s Horse Money, the director’s work has been ‘more praised by critics than carefully described and analyzed.’ This exhilarating book goes a long way toward correcting that imbalance.”
Chris Fujiwara, author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall 2025
222 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 12 COLOR ILLUS.
• 53 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Visualizing Film History
FILM ARCHIVES AND DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP
CHRISTIAN GOSVIG OLESEN ,
Assistant
Professor, Digital Media and Cultural Heritage, University of Amsterdam
Visualizing Film History is an accessible introduction to archive-based digital scholarship in film and media studies and beyond. With a combined focus on the history of film historiography, archiving, and recent digital scholarship— covering a period from the “first wave” of film archiving in the early 1900s to recent data art—this book proposes ways to work critically with digitized archives and research methods. Olesen encourages a shift towards new critical practices in the field with an in-depth assessment of and critical approach to doing film historiography with the latest digital tools and digitized archives.
Olesen argues that if students, scholars and archivists are to fully realize the potential of emerging digital tools and methodologies, they must critically consider the roles that data analysis, visualization, interfaces and procedural human-machinery interactions play in producing knowledge in current film historical research. If we fail to do so, we risk losing our ability to critically navigate and renew contemporary research practices and evaluate the results of digital scholarship.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Visualizing Film History - From the Film Archive to the Digital Humanities Lab
Part I: Sources, Archives, and Theories of Film History
1. Film Archives and Film Historiography
2. “From the Banks of Subjectivity to Rational Memory Administration”: Film Heritage Digitization between Cinephilia and Digital Integration
Part II: Techniques, Methods, and Traditions
3. Microscopic Visions of the Film-Text: Stylometry, Film Philology, and Multimedia Editions
4. Writing Film History from Below and Seeing It from Above: New Cinema History’s Macroscopic Vision
5. Film History and Deformative Criticism
6. Concluding Thoughts
Appendix
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film
DAMIEN POLLARD , Lecturer in Film, Northumbria University
NOVEMBER 2025
186 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 10 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
The Italian giallo was a sleazy, violent, and stylistically baroque form of horror film that was produced in the hundreds from the 1960s to the 1980s. Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film listens closely to these films, asking how their soundtracks and their use of the human voice can help us understand the giallo’s significance at a time when Italy was undergoing profound postwar social, economic, political, and cultural change.
Throughout the history of Italian cinema, soundtracks have been a site of concerted and sustained intervention by political and economic forces. In Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film, Pollard argues that, because the giallo film pushed the boundaries of film form while also touting unapologetic commercialism, the voices on its soundtracks were both aesthetically exaggerated and directly shaped by commercial imperatives, which were influenced by Italy’s turbulent postwar years.
Featuring case studies of several well-known giallo films, including The Girl Who Knew Too Much, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Short Night of Glass Dolls, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Torso, The New York Ripper, and Tenebrae, Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film is an original analysis that reveals how the cinematic voice binds film and history.
“Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film is everything one might hope for: convincing, sophisticated, accessible, and a major contribution to the study of popular Italian cinema and film sound.”
Robert A. Rushing, author of Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen
“[A] highly original, intellectually stimulating, and enjoyable piece of scholarship.”
Austin Fisher, author of Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema
“In a series of meticulous and insightful case studies focused on key giallo classics, Pollard enables us to hear as well as see this cycle of Italian suspense-thrillers in new ways.”
Leon Hunt, author of Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur
Sitcoms and Culture
FILM ARCHIVES AND DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP
JAMES SHANAHAN , Professor, Media School, Indiana University
Does it matter what television we watch? Despite their stodgy reputation among many consumers of television, sitcoms, or situation comedies, have stuck around as a cornerstone of the television landscape.
Sitcoms and Culture examines sitcoms as cultural artifacts ripe for exploration as they reflect the shifting landscapes of our society. From questions of social change to the portrayal of women and other racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, sitcoms have evolved alongside the major social changes of the last half century. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Shanahan combines research on cultural indicators with an empirical methodology and cultural analysis to examine over 50 years of sitcoms to discern the reality of how these comedies have portrayed life to us across generations of television.
Sitcoms and Culture helps us gain a deeper understanding of how sitcoms mirror and shape societal norms and of the pivotal role they have played in reflecting and influencing cultural trends.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Cultural Indicators
2. A brief history of situation comedies
3. “Sitlit”: Sitcoms and their images, content, and effects
4. Family, life, love, good, house: The universe and demography of sitcoms
5. Textual analysis
6. Sitcoms, cultural indicators, and social change
JOHN A. BURRISON , Regents’ Professor of English, Georgia State University; Curator, Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia
352 PAGES • 8 X 10 X 1.05 • 230 COLOR ILLUS. World rights, all languages
For most of human history, all pottery was what we would now consider traditional folk pottery. Not all artifacts go beyond the basic requirements of utility in pursuit of beauty, but Beautiful Clay considers those that do.
In Beautiful Clay, noted scholar of traditional ceramics Burrison writes about how a potter applies aesthetics to utilitarian objects to transform raw clay into something beautiful. Though what is considered beautiful in art changes from culture to culture and person to person, there are universal techniques such as manipulating form, color, texture, and more that tap into clay’s potential for beauty. Burrison uses an approach from a perspective of international artistry rather than an approach bound by history or geography. After beginning with more than 40,000 images that the author curated as a study resource, Beautiful Clay narrows it down to around 230 images that capture the artistry within traditional ceramics worldwide.
Beautiful Clay examines the aesthetic dimensions of what is essentially a traditional utilitarian craft, the ancient clay-based craft of pottery, from earliest times to the present.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Eye of the Beholder
1. Stretching Tradition: Ceramic Innovators, Known and Unknown
2. Form Follows Function
Index 2025
3. Hues: A Coat of Many Colors
4. The Traditional Potter as Designer/Decorator
5. Texture and Text: Tactile and Communicative Dimensions
6. The Traditional Potter as Sculptor
7. Beautiful Clay and the Future
Works Cited
Concept Work
CONSTRUCTING FRAMEWORKS FOR FOLKLORE STUDIES
JASON BAIRD JACKSON , Ruth N. Halls
Professor of Folklore and Anthropology, Indiana University
OCTOBER 2025
220 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 11 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Folklorists study the richness of customary forms of cultural expression and the everyday social worlds in which all people interact and communicate. They use a range of methods—literary, ethnographic, philological, visual, historical, comparative, artifactual—to engage with and learn from diverse peoples, but they also rely on a stock of key concepts that have grown up within their discipline, including tradition, performance, genre, text, context, community, and identity. But folklorists and their interlocutors live in an ever-changing world in which making sense of new social dynamics requires additional foundational concepts.
In Concept Work, folklorist and ethnologist Jackson illustrates scholarly concept work in folklore studies through fresh accounts of four concepts that are significant to the field but not yet richly explored by its practitioners—colonization, cultural heritage, cultural appropriation, and the place of folklore and folklore studies within the capitalist world system. Jackson closes the volume with a reflection on teaching and doing concept work with his students-turned-colleagues.
Concept Work is an essential introduction to the current work being done within folklore studies for teachers and students alike.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Concept Work in Folklore Studies
1. A Story of Colonialism and Its Lessons
2. Innovation, Habitus, and Heritage
3. On Cultural Appropriation
4. Towards Wider Framings: World-Systems Analysis and Folklore Studies
5. Teaching Concepts in Folklore Studies
References Cited
Deep Cosmopolitanism
KUTIYATTAM, DYNAMIC TRADITION, AND GLOBALIZING HERITAGE IN KERALA, INDIA
LEAH LOWTHORP , Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Folklore, University of Oregon
SEPTEMBER 2025
364 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 50 COLOR ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Deep Cosmopolitanism explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world’s oldest continuously performed theater. Recognized as India’s first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the matrilineal temple art of Kutiyattam has been performed by men and women in Kerala, India, since the tenth century C.E.
Deep Cosmopolitanism illustrates how Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, Lowthorp traces the art’s cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the premodern Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world.
Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam’s multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of one thousand years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.
“This brilliant and beautifully written book invites us to rethink what it means to be modern, traditional, and cosmopolitan. Insightful and engaging, it offers a compelling ethnographic exploration of the world’s oldest theater from the crossroads of anthropology, folklore, performance studies and critical heritage. With depth and subtlety, Leah Lowthorp challenges colonialist binaries as she convincingly decolonizes the notion of cultural heritage.”
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, author of Making Intangible Heritage
“[A] really valuable contribution to cultural and social theory, folkloristics, and the history of this extraordinary art form.”
Sheldon Pollock, author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India
“[A] must-read for anyone interested in theatre studies, as well as for those seeking to reassess the concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’“
Heike Oberlin, University of Tübingen, Germany
Creating Culture, Performing Community
AN ANGAHUAN WEDDING STORY
MINTZI AUANDA MARTÍNEZ-RIVERA ,
Assistant Professor of
English (Folklore) and Latinx Studies, The Ohio State University
2025
250 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 53 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Creating Culture, Performing Community explores the ways in which the people of Santo Santiago de Angahuan, a P’urhépecha community in the state of Michoacán, México, create and curate their cultural practices and how, by doing so, they perform what it means to be an active member of the P’urhépecha community. Through a deep ethnographic account of ritual practices, Martínez-Rivera focuses on the tembuchakua, or wedding rituals, analyzing their creation, performance, and transformation within the P’urhépecha community. By proposing alternative approaches to understanding indigeneity, Martínez-Rivera showcases how people carefully transform their cultural practices and rearticulate and perform their identities.
Thus Creating Culture, Performing Community has three main aims: to analyze how people create their own culture; to showcase how cultural practices are performed to reflect particular ideas of what it means to be a member of a community; and to move beyond limited understandings of indigenous identity and cultural practices.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Language, Style, and Images
Introduction: Getting Married in Angahuan
1. Under the Volcano’s Shadow: Angahuan and the P’urhépecha Area
2. Carrying the Uarhota: Courtship Rituals and Youth Cultures in Angahuan
3. Te Toca: Eloping vs. Asking for Marriage
4. Creating Culture: Organizing a Tembuchakua
Interlude: Joel and Daniela’s P’urhépecha Wedding (October 2009)
5. Performing Community: Following the Confetti Trail
6. Transforming the Tembuchakua
Conclusion: Getting Married in Angahuan, revisited
Bibliography
Index
Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance
EDITED BY SOLIMAR OTERO , Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and Gender Studies, Indiana University; & ANTHONY BAK BUCCITELLI , Interim
Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications, and Director, Pennsylvania Center for Folklore, Penn State University at Harrisburg—Capital College
2025
336 PAGES • 6.125 X 9.25 • 4 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance reveals the captivating world where folklore and performance studies meet up, revealing both the connections and disparities between the two fields. From the mid-20th century to the present day, luminaries like Richard Bauman, Erving Goffman, Roger Abrahams, Charles Briggs, Richard Schechner, Dell Hymes, José Esteban Muñoz, Peggy Phelan, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, Deborah Kapchan, and Diana Taylor have woven a rich tapestry of discourse, seamlessly blending the realms of folklore and performance. Otero and Buccitelli present a magnificent collection of chapters that delve into the intricacies of this enduring relationship. These diverse essays explore how folklore and performance intersect in realms as varied as digital culture, social movements, ritual, narrative, race and technology, archival practices, ambient play, posthuman intersectionalities, speculative world-making, and embodied knowledge.
Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance is a must-read for scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike, offering fresh insights into the evolving landscape of folklore and performance studies and transforming the ways that we connect to culture, place, and community.
“[A] long-awaited fresh look at the neglected yet critically important relationship between folklore and performance studies. … Worthy of attention by humanities scholars everywhere… .”
Kay Turner, New York University
“A remarkable collection. Global in range yet attentively grounded in local expression, this is a rarity of intellectual and creative achievement. ... All who care about our world made better through courageous cultural expression will find a reason to thank the contributors for these inspiring pages.”
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, University of Massachusetts
Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese and Chinese American Women
RACISMS, FEMINISMS, AND FOODWAYS
ZIYING YOU , Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies, University of Georgia
2025
266 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 2 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese and Chinese American Women examines how Chinese and Chinese American women in the United States experienced and responded to the double threat of the COVID-19 virus and anti-Asian racism from 2020 to 2021 and how the global pandemic changed their daily lives, foodways, and identities.
You addresses the social and cultural impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese and Chinese American Women in the US through the four key themes of racism and anti-racism efforts, foodways, gender construction, and community building. Drawing on virtual ethnography, interviews, surveys, social media analysis, and personal experiences of professional women, mothers, Chinese international students, lay Buddhist women, and Chinese adoptees, You shows that the racism triggered by COVID-19 echoes longstanding racist tropes such as “ the yellow peril” and discriminations faced by Chinese people in different parts of the world throughout the history of the Chinese diaspora. You further explores how individuals relating to one or more identities can form communities in which folklore helps them bond and express shared, unique cultural values.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Global Asian Folklore Studies, Feminisms, and AntiAsian Racisms
2. Building New Homes: Chinese Immigrant Mothers, Communities of Support, and Political Activisms During the Pandemic
3. To Return or To Stay: Chinese Women International Students and Their Transnational Experiences During the Pandemic
4. Coming Out of “the Fog”: Chinese Adoptees, Anti-Racist Solidarities, and Remaking Chinese/Asian American Identities
5. “Going Home”: Chinese Lay Buddhist Women, Diverse Agencies, and Hybrid Communities
6. Fluid Foodways, Racisms, and Everyday Lives
7. Conclusion
Appendix: List of Contributors
Bibliography Index
“[A]n important study that combines the best of belief studies with contemporary approaches to understanding trauma, public health, and quotidian creativity and sustenance. Solimar Otero, author of Archives of Conjure and co-editor of Theorizing Folklore from the Margins
The New Yugoslav Woman
REPRODUCTIVE REGULATION IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA
BRANKA BOGDAN , Early Career
Researcher specializing in social and cultural histories of gender, medicine and science in New Zealand, Europe, and US
SEPTEMBER 2025
254 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 15 B&W ILLUS.
• 2 B&W TABLES
World rights, all languages
From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex education and contraception, and laws that supported reproductive choice. Yugoslav men and women internalized these messages, proclaiming their homeland’s superior care for its citizens in comparison to postwar Europe and the United States. Even as Yugoslav women faced stigma and abuse for their usage of contraceptives and medical practitioners grappled with new regulations and technology alongside personal ideologies, Yugoslavs celebrated their own reformation into “new” politically minded citizens who carefully navigated tradition and modernity as they reconstructed the nation.
The New Yugoslav Woman provides a social and cultural history of how Yugoslav communists used reproductive regulation to build a platform of socialism through selfmanagement and to position the country as a conduit between the global North and South. Bogdan traces reproduction as a central facet of socialist Yugoslavia’s state formation through the nation’s laws, medical infrastructure, technological growth, and state-run sex education programs. Bringing this history to the present day with a discussion of more than two dozen interviews with Yugoslav patients and medical professionals, Bogdan reveals how these recollections show key continuities with the past rather than an abrupt break between the socialist and post-socialist worlds.
Drawing Yugoslavian women’s experiences into the geopolitical history of reproduction and the Cold War–era state, The New Yugoslav Woman reveals the centrality of reproduction, contraception, and abortion to socialist Yugoslavia’s self-conception as the developed leader of the developing world.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
1. Establishing a Legal Landscape of Reproductive Regulation, 1945–1953
2. An Infrastructure to Medicalize Reproduction, 1945–1965
3. Yugoslavia and Fertility Control Technology, 1960–1974
4. Yugoslav Sex Education and Family Planning, 1960s and 1970s
5. Deconstructing Yugoslav Women’s Recollections of Reproductive Regulation
Conclusion: Regulating Reproduction in Yugoslavia During Socialism, and Beyond
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
The Illegible Man
DISABILITY AND MASCULINITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
WILL KANYUSIK , Associate Professor of English, Loras College
2025
236 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 9 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an “able” body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society’s shared notions of heteronormative masculinity?
In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America’s war in Vietnam. Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s.
Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Disability, Masculinity, and the Problem of Legibility in Postwar American Fiction
2. From Trust to Suspicion: Disability, Masculinity, and the American Culture of Scrutiny in the War Department Documentary
3. Tactile Visions: Disability, Prosthesis, and the Problem of Recognition in Postwar American Cinema
4. Returns and Repressions: Economies of Violence and Anxieties on the Home Front
5. Landscapes of Loss: Disability, The American Wilderness, and the Remasculinization of the Vietnam Veteran
Coda: Disability, Resilience, and the Cost of American Hegemony under Neoliberalism
Bibliography
Index
Progressive Women’s Movements in Austria and Hungary
CONFLICT, COOPERATION, CIRCULATION
DÓRA FEDELES-CZEFERNER , Research Fellow, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History
SEPTEMBER 2025
294 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 11 B&W ILLUS.
• 12 CHARTS • 6 B&W TABLES
World rights, all languages
At the dawn of the twentieth century, three trailblazing women’s associations emerged from the Austro-Hungarian middle class: Vienna’s Allgemeiner österreichischer Frauenverein (AöF) and Budapest’s closely linked Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete (NOE) and Feministák Egyesülete (FE). Spearheaded by educated professional women, these groups championed progressive and often radical ideals, forging robust international connections with other women’s movements. However, the shifting political landscapes in Austria and Hungary eventually led to their decline and near-erasure from history.
In Progressive Women’s Movements in Austria and Hungary, Fedeles-Czeferner dives deeply into these movements, transcending conscribed national narratives to uncover the daily workings of these Austrian bourgeois-liberal and Hungarian feminist organizations. She reveals how they both influenced and were influenced by international activism. Unlike their contemporaries in the ChristianSocial and Socialist Democratic women’s movements, the AöF, NOE, and FE operated independently of official political parties, leveraging the influential connections of their leaders and using strategic publicity to garner support. Despite their mutual inspirations and connections, these organizations had significant differences. They varied in their origins, their ability to engage rural members, and their strategies for achieving their goals.
Fedeles-Czeferner employs entangled history methodologies to examine these organizations’ foundations, key figures, memberships, objectives, and activities from the beginning of the 20th century until the beginning of the 1920s. By challenging regional narratives that have marginalized these radical women’s movements, she reconnects Austria-Hungary’s pre-war feminist past to its transnational roots, revealing their true historical significance.
Glocalized Security
DOMESTIC AND EXTERNAL ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
EDITED BY ABU BAKARR BAH , Presidential Research Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Northern Illinois University
2025
258 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 1 B&W ILLUS. • 2 B&W
TABLES
World rights, all languages
What forces drive violent conflicts, and whose interests are protected by military involvement? In those conflicts, how do domestic factors fuse with external dynamics, and what issues spell the difference between successful and failed intervention?
Enter Glocalized Security—a concept that argues that the fusion of domestic and external matters produces war dynamics which require both substantial domestic reforms and realignment of external interests to achieve sustainable peace. Volume contributors use this concept to examine grievances and interests in and around war-torn countries. Combining disciplines—sociology, political science, peace studies, public policy and administration— case studies draw on over thirty years of international military interventions in countries such as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Somalia. Analyzing the intersectional relationship of the local and global, this book provides insights into the problems of international security and why military interventions often fail to ensure peace and security in conflict zones where these factors have morphed into terrorism warfare or zones of national interest among world and regional powers. By focusing on motivators— ethnicity, religion, poverty, and governance—of violent conflicts, Glocalized Security provides a conceptual basis for understanding international relations in the twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Glocalized Security and the Conundrums of Peace and Security, by Abu Bakarr Bah
2. Contemporary Nationalisms and Conceptions of National Security: Military Power and the Reshaping of International Security, by Abu Bakarr Bah
3. Taliban’s Return, Terrorism, and Regional Security Policy Convergence on Afghanistan, by Haqmal Daudzai & Farooq Yousaf
4. Prestige Seeking and International Commitments: Turkey’s Involvement in the Nagorno-Karabakh War, by Ünsal Sığrı & Taha Kalaycı
5. Kenya’s Collective Security Approach in a Glocalized Security Environment in Somalia, by Francis Onditi & James Yuko
6. Shi’ism as Ideological Vector: International and Domestic Security in Iranian Foreign Policy in Iraq, by Massimo Ramaioli
7. Communal Conflicts and Radicalization into Non-Jihadi Violent Extremism in Nigeria: The Case of Southern Kaduna, by Gbemisola Abdul-Jelil Animasawun
8. The Yam Between Two Boulders: India, China, and the Glocalization of Contention in Nepal, by Ches Thurber
9. Conclusion: Glocalized Security, Intersectionality, and a Sociology of International Peace and Security, by Abu Bakarr Bah Index
Periodical Famines
IRISH MEMORIES IN TRANSATLANTIC NEWS MEDIA, 1845 – 1919
LINDSAY JANSSEN , Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University
2025
338 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 20 B&W ILLUS. • 1 B&W
TABLE World rights, all languages
Long regarded as Ireland’s greatest modern demographic disaster, the Great Famine (1845–1851) has shaped Irish identities worldwide. From memorials and political rhetoric to literature, music, and film, the Famine remains central to Irish cultural memory— and has even connected with non-Irish communities across borders and histories. Periodical Famines explores how Irish, Irish American, and Irish Canadian newspapers and magazines from 1845 to 1910 acted as both carriers and shapers of cultural identity. Janssen argues that famine memory was used transhistorically to interpret key events in Irish history and transnationally to shed light on global issues, including U.S. labor struggles and the Second Boer War. Janssen examines how texts within the same periodical issue interacted to influence readers’ views on Irish hunger and hardship, revealing the complex, and at times divergent, paths famine memory traveled. Drawing on nearly 600 works of creative and nonfiction writing, Periodical Famines offers a comprehensive analysis of transatlantic Irish periodical culture, demonstrating how periodicals’ transmission of famine memories shaped global cultures.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section I: Transhistorical Connections
1. Famine Print Patterns
2. Famine and Temporal Stasis in a Story Paper: Young Ireland Magazine, 1875–88
3. Special Correspondence on Ireland in the Early 1880s: Current and Past Famines in Margaret Dixon McDougall’s “A Tour through Ireland”
4. Famine, Fiction, and Historicity in The Irish Packet during the First Years of the Twentieth Century
Section II: Diasporic and Transnational Connections
5. “Famine, or Farms”: McGee’s Illustrated Weekly and the Betterment of the Poor Laborer’s Lot, 1876–82
6. Humiliating the Nation: Imperial Oppression, Gender, and Hunger in Maud Gonne’s Periodical Writings on Ireland and South Africa, 1898–1904
7. Imperialism versus Economic Progress: The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator and Robert Ellis Thompson on Famines in Ireland and India at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Conclusion: Travelling Irish Famine Memories in Transatlantic Periodical Culture
Appendices 1-4
Bibliography
Index
Island Endurance
CREATIVE HERITAGE ON INISHARK AND INISHBOFIN
RYAN LASH , Teaching Fellow, The School of Archaeology, University College Dublin
2025
344 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 112 COLOR ILLUS.
• 3 B&W TABLES
World rights, all languages
Many look to Ireland’s Atlantic islands as timeless places, resistant to change. Island Endurance offers an alternative perspective, examining two neighboring islands where people have cultivated their heritage to confront new challenges and opportunities across centuries.
To the west, Inishark is a landscape of ruins, with monuments from a medieval monastery alongside the remnants of a village that endured privation and isolation before its evacuation in 1960. To the east, Inishbofin remains home to a small community of nearly 200 that bustles every summer with thousands of visitors drawn by the island’s reputation for hospitality and distinctive local heritage. Combining archaeological discoveries with folklore and ethnography, Lash explores how islanders from three different historical eras encountered, altered, and reimagined traces of the past. Fifteen years of fieldwork reconstruct more than a millennium of creativity—from the development of pilgrimage traditions at the shrines of monastic saints, to the reuse of medieval monuments for local devotions in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the repurposing of ruins for managing livestock and guiding tourist trails in the 21st century. Attuned to the sensory dynamics and other-than-human elements of landscapes, Lash illustrates the power of quartz pebbles, picnics, and sheep farming to generate vital perceptions of place, time, and belonging.
Islanders have continually and creatively adapted their heritage to foster shared experiences, negotiate collaborative relations, and sustain livelihoods amid adversity. Island Endurance shows us that the illusion of timelessness has always relied on the creativity of heritage.
“Beautifully written, sensitive, and insightful, this is historical anthropology at its best. … Thoroughly engaging.”
Audrey Horning, editor of Becoming and Belonging in Ireland, AD 1200-1600
“Written in an engaging and accessible style, it is a model study with far-reaching implications that deserves to be widely read by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and anyone with an interest in ritual, heritage, and sustainability.”
Tomás Ó Carragáin, author of Churches in the Irish Landscape AD 400-1100
“A major work of scholarship.”
—Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, author of Locating Irish Folklore
Are You Dancing?
POPULAR MUSIC, AND MEMORY IN MODERN IRELAND
REBECCA S. MILLER , Professor of Music, Hampshire College
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, showbands were all the rage among Ireland’s dancing audiences. Performing covers of rock ‘n’ roll and pop hits from American and British weekly Top 10 charts, they riveted their fans, dismayed many parish priests, and offered Irish youth a taste of modernism and pop culture from outside of Ireland.
Are You Dancing? tells the story of how these workingclass bands brought new sounds and choreographies to the Irish and Northern Irish pop landscape. Both as a response to and an agent in Ireland’s changing economic landscape, showbands quickly grew into a hugely lucrative commercial industry. At the same time, they nudged open doors for Irish women to take to the stage as pop stars, rewarded a generation of entrepreneurs, and created the template for Ireland’s popular music industry. Miller draws upon interviews with more than 80 musicians, agents, managers, fans, and clergy, to reveal the vast interplay of social, economic, and cultural changes that ensued with the Irish showband era.
Drawing upon an extensive catalog of ethnographic and archival research, Miller presents an overlooked era of musical performances that revolutionized Irish entertainment.
“This book is a must-read for anyone interested in processes of change and modern Ireland, and further afield in twentieth century popular music studies in a post-colonial context.”
Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Centre for Irish Studies, University of Galway
“The fruit of exhaustive archival research and hundreds of interviews, [Are You Dancing?] is an admirable example of the best kind of academic writing: fluent, authoritative, free of either nostalgia or embarrassment—and beautifully illustrated.”
The Irish Times
A Journey to Mecca and London
THE TRAVELS OF AN INDIAN MUSLIM WOMAN, 1909 – 1910
BEGUM SARBULAND JUNG
TRANSLATED & EDITED BY DANIEL
MAJCHROWICZ , Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture, Northwestern University
312
COLOR PLATES
World rights, all languages
Descended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad, India, where she lived a privileged life in the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, they traveled for four months through the Middle East and Europe, performing the hajj in Mecca and sitting for tea with the future British monarchs.
A Journey to Mecca and London presents the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's Urdu travel diary from this journey, of which only three original copies remain. Her candid entries reveal both the everyday practices of an Indian woman of her time and her impressions and reactions as she explored the world. As Begum Sarbuland met other women and Muslims during her travels, those encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim woman. Her observations hold continued significance for readers interested in critical questions about gender, Islam, and identity. Majchrowicz has thoroughly annotated his translation and paired it with rich appendices, including a biographical sketch of Begum Sarbuland and excerpts from her husband's accounts of their journey.
Engagingly written and enriched with original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London restores the nearly forgotten story of one of India's first Muslim women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic history.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction
Part I: The World Through a Woman's Eyes: A Travelogue of East and West Preface
1. Hyderabad
2. Bombay to Suez
3. Palestine
4. Medina
5. The Levant and Sinai
6. Mecca
7. Egypt
8. Constantinople
9. Europe
10. Hyderabad
Part II: Begum Sarbuland: A Life Untold Appendices I and II
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Mother’s Milk
ESSAYS ON CHILD-REARING, THE HOUSEHOLD, AND THE MAKING OF JEWISH CULTURE
DEENA ARANOFF , Faculty Director, Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union
SEPTEMBER 2025
172 PAGES • 6 X 9
World rights, all languages
This book engages with an age-old question: What accounts for the persistence of Jewish culture through the ages? Despite significant variations, how were Jewish cultural elements sustained over the millennia?
Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture proposes that we include the earliest phases of child-rearing in the history of Jewish cultural production. Aranoff argues that some of the most enduring aspects of Jewish culture are produced in the context of household and family relations.
Mother’s Milk examines how Jewish practices, including rabbinic halakhah, are derived from household custom and unfold within the context of family life. Aranoff proposes a revised genealogy of Jewish culture that emphasizes the interplay between everyday life and formal Jewish practice.
“Deena Aranoff’s brilliant and groundbreaking book opens vistas on the crucial role of the household and child-rearing in the making of Jewish culture, a role lost to our amnesia of early childhood and the ideological erasure of the maternal labor required to sustain it.”
Naomi
Seidman, University of Toronto
The Making of “Jew Clubs”
PERFORMING JEWISHNESS AND ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPEAN FOOTBALL AND FAN CULTURES
PAVEL BRUNSSEN , Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer, Research Center on Antigypsyism, Heidelberg University
SEPTEMBER 2025
480 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 52 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Why do non-Jewish football fans chant “Yid Army” or wave “Super Jews” banners—especially in support of clubs that are not Jewish? The Making of “Jew Clubs” explores how four major European football clubs—FC Bayern Munich, FK Austria Vienna, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur—came to be seen as “Jew Clubs,” even though they have never officially identified as Jewish.
In this transnational study, Brunssen traces how both Jewish and non-Jewish actors perform Jewishness, antisemitism, and philosemitism within European football cultures over the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from fan chants and matchday rituals to media portrayals and club histories— the book reveals how football stadiums have become unexpected stages for negotiating memory, identity, and historical trauma.
Offering a new approach to Holocaust memory, sports history, and Jewish studies, The Making of “Jew Clubs” shows how football cultures reflect and reshape Europe’s conflicted relationship with its Jewish past.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. FC Bayern Munich: The “Jew Club” as Memory Culture
2. FK Austria Vienna: The “Jew Club” as Cultural Code
3. Ajax Amsterdam: The “Jew Club” as Fan Performance
4. Tottenham Hotspur: Problematizing the “Jew Club”
Conclusion
Afterword: The “Jew Clubs” after October 7 Appendix: Archives, Monuments, and Museums
“A masterful comparative study that shows that sports is crucial to fully understand the modern Jewish experience and the history of antisemitism.”
Michael Brenner, author of In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea
Saving
Our Survivors
HOW AMERICAN JEWS LEARNED ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST
RACHEL DEBLINGER , Director, Modern Endangered Archives Program, UCLA Library
2025
224 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 12 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.
Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.
“Rich in archival research, Deblinger’s book is a timely reassessment of the myth of postwar silence and, instead, presents a fascinating tapestry of voices, campaigns, and media that help us appreciate the many ways in which Holocaust memory has been continually shaped and reshaped.”
Todd
Samuel Presner, University of California Los Angeles
The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture
BETWEEN PRACTICE AND PHANTASM
EDITED BY HALINA GOLDBERG , Professor of Musicology and Director, Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University; & BOŻENA SHALLCROSS , Professor of Polish Literature and Core Faculty, Institute on the Formation of Culture, University of Chicago
2025
254 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 32 B&W ILLUS. • 2 B&W TABLES
World rights, all languages
Before World War II, the Jewish inn (żydowska karczma) was a cornerstone of economic and social life in Polish lands—offering hospitality while serving as a hub for business, leisure, and religious celebration, reflecting its vital role in the community.
The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture presents 11 essays that explore the inn’s significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibility. The collection examines the inn’s evolving artistic potential across eras, genres, media, and analytical perspectives. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn’s spatial arrangement to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn’s family dynamics, this volume offers a comprehensive, transdisciplinary reevaluation of this crucial institution and stands as a rich, creative contribution to PolishJewish studies.
Table of Contents
Preface: An Invitation to the Jewish Inn, by Bożena Shallcross Acknowledgments
Note on Place Names, Personal Names, and Transliterations
Part I: Theatrical and Literary Phantasms
1. The Jewish Innkeeper in Polish National Ballet, by Halina Goldberg
2. The Romantic Invention of the Jewish Inn, by Bożena Shallcross
Part II: Contractual Frameworks
3. Jewish Tavern Here and There: An Impact of Regional and Other Differences in Forms of Rural Lease-Holdings before and after Partitions, by Judith Kalik
Part III: Communal Spaces in Transition
4. Jewish Musicians in the Polish Inn during the Nineteenth Century, by Benjamin Vogel
5. From Taverns to Courtyards and Cafes: How the Shtetl Transferred/ Migrated in Fin-De-Siècle Warsaw, by Beth Holmgren
Part IV: Innkeepers’ Daughters
6. Jula’s Diary: A Hasidic Tavernkeeper’s Daughter during the First World War, by Glenn Dynner
7. Writing for Hay: Wyspiański’s Rachela as Arbiter of Speculative Value, by Eliza Rose
Part V: The Voided Austeria
8. From Lost Center to Not-Knowing: On the Use of the Jewish Inn in Julian Stryjkowski’s The Inn And Piotr Szewc’s Annihilation, by Alexander Lindskog
9. Austeria and a Tavern, by Iwona Kurz
Part VI: After Nostalgia
10. Serving Ciulim in Polish Countryside: Food and the Construction of a “Polish-Jewish Heritage”, by Magdalena Zatorska
11. Jewish Tavern, Jewish Places: Beyond Nostalgia, by Sławomir Sikora
Bibliography
Index
Animal, Vegetal, Marginal
THE GERMAN LITERARY GROTESQUE FROM PANIZZA TO KAFKA
JOELA JACOBS , Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of Arizona
2025
282 PAGES • 6 X 9
World rights, all languages
Between the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s Reichs, the genre of die Groteske, or the German literary grotesque, sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers with its irreverent comedy and critique. At the same time, its authors were ruthlessly censored for their satire of society, leaving die Groteske virtually unknown today.
As the first full-length study of the genre, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal recovers this short prose form, which draws on the perspectives of marginalized animals, plants, and individuals to challenge what it means to be human. Jacobs traces the development of the genre and its variations from the work of Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Salomo Friedlaender to Franz Kafka.
Animal, Vegetal, Marginal shows how marginalized and nonhuman voices mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.
“In addition to being a major contribution to German studies, the book is groundbreaking for interweaving insights from literary, plant, and animal studies, and as such extends the innovative interdisciplinary research program that secures Jacobs’s international reputation as a rising star.”
Susan McHugh, author of Love in the Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction
“A pioneering study of an important German literary genre. . . . Jacobs’s command of the subject matter is impressive, indeed.”
Peter D. G. Brown, author of Oskar Panizza: His Life and Works and Oskar Panizza and The Love Council
Men of Valor and Anxiety
POLISH-JEWISH MASCULINITIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY
MARIUSZ KALCZEWIAK , Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Lucerne
OCTOBER 2025
428 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 27 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities.
Men of Valor and Anxiety explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Kalczewiak applies recent paradigms of gender theory and social history to offer a sensitive historical analysis of personal memoirs, advice books, archives of Jewish institutions, and journalistic commentaries. This study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession.
Focusing on an ethnic minority in a country that first struggled for independence and later embarked on an accelerated modernization project, Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and gender were constructed within both global and local contexts.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation, Spelling, and Transliteration
Introduction
1. Yeshiva Men: Elite Religious Knowledge and Intellectual Potency
2. A Jew and His Penis: Circumcision and the Entanglements of Jewishness and Masculinity
3. Boys Showing Off: Working Class, Strongmen, and Corporeality
4. Tender Bonds of Fraternal Affection: Student Fraternities, Homosocial Sociability, and Jewish Respectability
5. Pulling the Trigger: Military and Jewish Masculinities
6. Leisure and Toil: Masculinity in Profession, Family, and Consumer Culture
7. Homosexual Masculinities: Between Crime, Progressive Calls and Homophobic Subversion Epilogue Notes
Bibliography
Index
Jewish Books in North Africa
BETWEEN THE EARLY MODERN AND MODERN WORLDS
NOAM SIENNA , Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Toronto
2025
348 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 9 B&W ILLUS
World rights, all languages
Jewish Books in North Africa delves into the multifaceted significance of books among North African Jews. From the late Middle Ages to the 19th century, this exploration encompasses the history, manufacture, distribution, and readership of Jewish books. These texts were not mere vessels of knowledge; they were integral to a vibrant cultural tapestry that stretched across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. By examining cultural centers and tracing the journey of these texts, Sienna provides depth to our understanding of a remarkably global and worldly book culture, and its evolving role in the growth of Jewish modernity.
While the content of Jewish books has long fascinated scholars, Jewish Books in North Africa shifts our focus to the physical context. These books were not isolated artifacts; they were embedded in cultural networks during a period of religious, political, and cultural transformation. Sienna’s work sheds light on the intricate interplay between books and the dynamic world in which they existed.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
On Transliteration and Translation Archival Abbreviations
Introduction: The World of Maghrebi Jewish Books
1. Medieval Books in Early Modern North Africa
2. Scribes, Artists, and Patrons of the Handwritten Book
3. Maghrebi Jews in European Printing Houses
4. Elia Benamozegh and the Modern Maghrebi Jewish Book
5. Landscapes of Print in the Nineteenth-Century Maghreb
6. Early Modern and Modern Maghrebi Jewish Libraries
Conclusion: The Ink in My Veins
Notes
Bibliography
Index
On Beckett,
EDITED BY JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ , Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania; & LAUREL GARVER
282 PAGES • 6 X 9
World rights, all languages
This collection of essays was born from a wish to show to a wider audience how exciting and productive Samuel Beckett scholarship has become, at a time when there are more essays and books written about Beckett than about any key modernist authors like Joyce and Woolf. This volume contains numerous essays on Beckett that the Journal of Modern Literature has published in the last decade. Their enduring quality proves that Beckett's oeuvre has maintained its appeal today because it attracts original scholars who are also interested in issues like philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, contemporary history, and literary theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Jean-Michel Rabaté
Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught, by Jeremy Colangelo Beckettian Habit and Deictic Exhaustion, by Shuta Kiba
Glitches in Logic in Beckett's Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics, by Amanda M. Dennis
Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers, by Hunter Dukes Blanchot in Infinite Conversation(s) with Beckett, by Arleen Ionescu Beckett, Painting and the Question of "the human", by Kevin Brazil
Art of Impoverishment: Beckett and arte povera, by Erika Mihálycsa Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception, by Emilie Morin
Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity, by Ruben Borg
Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanistic Ethics, by Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation, by Rick De Villiers
Who Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy, by Yael Levin
'Tis my muse will have it so": Four Dimensions of Scatology in Molloy, by Andrew G. Christensen "Strange laughter": Post-Gothic Questions of Laughter and the Human in Samuel Beckett's Work, by Hannah Simpson
The Illusionless: Adorno and the Afterlife of Laughter in How It Is, by Michelle Rada
Crossing the Line
AN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN LOVE STORY
MYA GUARNIERI , Writer and Journalist
SEPTEMBER 2025
292 PAGES • 5.5 X 8.5 World rights, all languages
In Crossing the Line, journalist and writer Guarnieri recounts the story of a real-life Romeo and Juliet: herself, a Jewish American immigrant to Israel lecturing at a Palestinian university, and Mohamed, a fellow journalist and the son of a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization. This timely memoir chronicles how, despite the Israelibuilt separation barrier that stood between them, Mya and Mohamed managed to meet, fall in love, and overcome the external and internal obstacles that threatened to keep them apart. With a reporter’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s knack for nuance, she shares the political, cultural, and family problems the star-crossed lovers faced throughout their courtship. Crossing the Line is not only a reflection on her own story, however; this compelling memoir also offers an intimate look at daily life in Palestinian areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank; it explores the complexity of loving one’s “enemy”; and it serves as a tortured love letter to the land and the people who call the place home.
In a dark moment in the long history of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Crossing the Line is a spot of light that imagines a different future for the two peoples. It is also a universal story about the challenges of overcoming our innermost emotional barriers and making ourselves vulnerable to love.
“There are countless ways to talk about Israel and Palestine but few as moving and engrossing as this memoir. Crossing the Line is wonderful.”
Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“A remarkable story, beautifully told, which shows that love can transgress even the most brutal political divides.”
Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
“Guarnieri writes with the lyric precision of one who has learned to translate survival into song.”
Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial
“Crossing The Line is a genuinely singular and essential book. It is a love story unlike any other I have ever read. And it is a portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy unlike any other I have ever read. In both ways, Mya Guarnieri has written with both lyrical compassion and unrelenting, unflinching moral integrity.”
Samuel Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
Milkweed and Honey Cake
WENDY A. HORWITZ , Author, Teacher, and Psychologist
248 PAGES • 5.5 X 8.5
In Milkweed and Honey Cake, Horwitz shares stories about celebration, loss, change, and the best way to open a pomegranate. Holidays delight – and disappoint. A couple marrying in the pandemic finds a surprise after a rainstorm, and a topsy-turvy search for a gravestone honors her ancestors. When a graduation is cancelled, Horwitz serves pomp and circumstance on the front porch, and through the shifting seasons of a life, amid the scramble of pet guinea pigs and birthday parties, her children add wonder and comedy to tradition.
With observations from nature, religion, and literature, Horwitz explores how ritual can exalt ordinary moments and frame the extraordinary. Guiding us along a wooded path, to the kitchen table, in a messy garden, and under a tent reverberating with song, she traces the boundaries of ritual, considering what we do when ritual falls short, and how we might adapt each other’s practices. And when the wider world seems broken, new rituals provide hope.
Lyrical and funny, thought-provoking and deeply moving, Milkweed and Honey Cake is at once a meditation on our desire for meaning and the story of a woman’s lifelong efforts to create it.
“Horwitz’s keen insights and gentle wisdom reveal the transformative power of rituals to enrich our everyday experiences, infusing purpose and reverence into our lives. A profound and illuminating read for anyone seeking deeper meaning in their daily journey.”
Lori Erikson, author of Every Step is Home: A Spiritual Geography from Appalachia to Alaska
“[A] work to be savored; its flavor lingers long after finishing the work.”
Jewish Journal
Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace
PATTERNS, PROBLEMS, POSSIBILITIES | THIRD EDITION
LAURA ZITTRAIN EISENBERG , Professor Emerita of History, Carnegie Mellon University; & NEIL CAPLAN , Scholar in Residence, Vanier College, and Affiliate Faculty, Department of History, Concordia University
2025
502 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 44 B&W ILLUS. • 13
MAPS • 3 CHARTS
World rights, all languages
Japanese rights sold to first edition
Fifteen years since the publication of its second edition, this foundational text in the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking endeavors has been updated to include developments from the past 25 years.
Thoroughly revised and expanded, the third edition of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace examines the history of recurrent efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1970s and identifies a pattern of negative negotiating behaviors that repeatedly derail peacemaking efforts. In addition to updating all of the book’s existing chapters with post-2010 sources and developments, the authors have added new chapters on the Arab Peace Initiative, the Annapolis Conference, the Kerry mission, and the Abraham Accords, as well as a conclusion that questions several core notions regarding the nature of the conflict, the possibility of its resolution, ArabIsraeli “normalization,” and the viability of the two-state solution. An epilogue extends the book’s framework into present-day crises in the region, specifically Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. A companion website comprises nine appendices, among them 145 primary source documents, expanded notes, links to websites for maps, data and analysis, peace activities, and additional visual and documentary sources. Also online is a robust instructor’s guide offering supplementary resources and ideas for assignments, research and classroom exercises, all of which draw upon and complement the themes running throughout the text.
“… in a class of its own … a book to be enjoyed by expert practitioners, well-read scholars, inexperienced undergraduates, and interested readers in the public. The authors are to be congratulated for such a notable achievement.”
Frederic C. Hof, author of Beyond the Boundary: Lebanon, Israel, and the Challenge of Change
“Nothing in my library comes close to Eisenberg and Caplan’s unique and balanced treatment of the peace process. Their book is more essential today than when it was first published and contains many lessons that the parties could still benefit from.”
Philip Mattar, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa
“One of the best presentations of how the Middle East not only can be but should be approached from a theoretical perspective.”
Glenn Palmer, Penn State University
Filling the Head
LISTENING TO RAP IN ARABIC
RAYYA EL ZEIN , Independent Writer and Researcher
190 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 9 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
When asked what drew them to experimental Arabiclanguage rap, performers and fans shared a common refrain: various artists or tracks “filled their head” (abba rasshom), offering relief from their dissatisfaction, cynicism, resignation, and disgust with contemporary politics and society.
Based on ethnographic research in Ramallah (Palestine), Amman (Jordan), and Beirut (Lebanon), Filling the Head reveals how youths in these cities have maneuvered the challenges of making music while also navigating shifting geopolitical landscapes. Through these everyday experiences of being moved by music or ideas, El Zein explores how ordinary patterns of motion and emotion provide a space for political engagement when spectacular political movements like protests, strikes, or revolutions feel far away, forced, or otherwise impossible. In contrast to existing narratives that equate rap with popular political resistance against oppressive regimes, she argues instead for affective engagement through istifzaz provocation or surprise—as well as yearning. Within this avant-garde genre, there is no design to reach the masses with a political message; in fact, as El Zein demonstrates, the refusal of artists to confine their lyrical or musical experimentation to an ethos of resistance creates an aesthetic whose lack of singular politics defines it.
Threading reflections from fans, rappers, DJs, producers, and venue owners with thick descriptions of live concerts and mediated listening practices, Filling the Head offers new insights into what it means politically to be moved.
“A historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated book that is set to become the definitive work on Arabic rap and hiphop culture for years to come.”
Tarek El-Ariss, author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political
“[A] stunning account of the rich tapestry of voices that contribute to the thriving and vibrant Arabic rap music scenes in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. Through a series of evocative interviews and immersive descriptions that demonstrate what music can do politically, El Zein breaks new boundaries into studies of the politics of cultural resistance in and about the region.”
Hanan Toukan, author of The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan
Guide to the Aria Repertoire, Volume II
MARK ROSS CLARK , Professor Emeritus of Music and Theatre, University of Louisiana Monroe; Director, The Louisiana Opera
SEPTEMBER 2025
320 PAGES • 6.125 X 9.25
World rights, all languages
Fifteen years since the publication of its first volume, this invaluable guide to some of the most challenging aria excerpts continues with Volume II.
Featuring an entirely new selection of arias, Guide to the Aria Repertoire, Volume II brings together many sources to aid the singer on their journey toward powerful, informed performances. Volume I of this guide has proven a tried-and-true resource for the developing operatic singer, with a wealth of insightful commentary from world-famous singers, directors, and other professionals as well as comments on interpreting arias and roles. Volume II follows in this tradition, discussing additional works and including some contemporary and lesserknown works beyond the standard selection. The arias in this guide are organized by voice type, and represent canonical, contemporary, and obscure works from different languages. Each reference listing addresses level of difficulty, voice and character type, special techniques, tessitura, accompaniment, and more.
Guide to the Aria Repertoire, Volume II will be invaluable to the performer, student, and teacher of operatic repertoire throughout their developing careers.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section I: Soprano
Section II: Mezzo-Soprano
Section III: Tenor
Section IV: Baritone and Bass
Index
Musical Argonauts of Central Asia
THE AGA KHAN MUSIC PROGRAMME’S QUEST TO REVITALIZE CULTURAL HERITAGE
THEODORE LEVIN , Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music, Dartmouth College
DECEMBER 2025
312 PAGES • 6.125 X 9.25 • 72 COLOR
ILLUS. • 4 B&W TABLES World rights, all languages
Musical Argonauts of Central Asia tells the story of the Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP) and its sustained efforts to revitalize Central Asian musical heritage in the wake of seven decades of Soviet rule.
Theodore Levin has worked with the program since its inception and offers an insider’s account of how the AKMP’s development tactics and strategies were formulated and their outcomes assessed. In doing so, Levin addresses fundamental questions about the power of music and what NGOs can do to help shape music’s social impact: In what sense are music, musicians, and musical life amenable to interventions by a development organization? What do such interventions contribute to the quality of life of their beneficiaries? And what does an ethical development intervention in music look like? In chronicling the work of the AKMP, Levin establishes the bona fides of a type of institutional cultural activism that isn’t captured by rubrics such as applied ethnomusicology, public folklore, and safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.
Featuring case studies of country-specific interventions in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Musical Argonauts of Central Asia provides a practical roadmap for aspiring activist ethnomusicologists and folklorists that models best practices, analyzes failures, and advocates for the role that ethnographers can and should play in international development organizations.
“This unique book spans personal memoir, ethnomusicology, development studies, and the cultural history of Central Asia. Levin’s description of the Aga Khan Music Programme is as absorbing and moving as the musicking worlds that are the book’s subject.”
Shahzad Bashir, Dean, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University
Festival Activism
EDITED BY DAVID A. MCDONALD , Associate Professor of Music Education, Berklee College of Music; & ANDREW SNYDER , Research Fellow, Ethnomusicology Institute–Center for Studies in Music and Dance, NOVA University Lisbon; & JEREMY REED , PhD in Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
OCTOBER 2025
336 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 19 B&W ILLUS. World rights, all languages
Festivals have long been important sites of inquiry for folklorists and ethnomusicologists as celebrations of culture. Moving beyond traditional notions of staged culture and multiculturalism, however, this volume explores how festivals may be mobilized as strategic forms of direct action. This collection of case studies from scholars, performers, and arts administrators, all of whom argue that festivals do more than celebrate culture; they also shape culture, creating new forms of aspirational community with direct political effects. Specifically, Festival Activism addresses the ways festivals provide resources for imagining and enacting social change, alternative citizenship, and political transformation, revealing how performers, participants, and organizers encounter and challenge the violence that frames their worlds. With its emphasis on activism, direct action, and social justice, Festival Activism points toward a new paradigm in festival research, one that focuses on decolonial and justice-oriented methods to illuminate festivals’ latent political potential.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Carnival Arts and “Freedom Dreams”: An Ethnography of Culture, Power, and Black Political Struggle in London’s Carnival Scene, by Deonte L. Harris
2. Rethinking Relational Geometries in Musical Events in Europe: Artistic Devices and Activist Implications, by Filippo Bonini Baraldi
3. An Accessible Carnival: Festivity, Inclusion, and Disability in Rio de Janeiro, by Andrew Snyder
4. The Festivalization of Feminism, DIY Music, and Intersecting Identities at Ladyfests, by Louise Barrière
5. Love Songs that Protest: Sentipensante Music Making as Postneoliberal Activism in the Neighborhood Tango Festivals of Buenos Aires, by Jennie Gubner
6. Al-Balad Theater: Festivals as Sites of Social Action and Community Development in Neoliberal Jordan, by Jeremy Reed & Serene Huleileh
7. Resignifying Traditional Festive Culture for Progressive Ends in Portugal, by Miguel Moniz
8. Another Possible World: Transnational Activism at WOMAD, by James Nissen
9. Babaláwo and Bataleras: Translocal Academic and Ritual Activism at the Festival of the Caribbean (Festival del Caribe) in Eastern Santiago de Cuba, by Ruthie Meadows
10. Festival Study as a Framework for Dialogic Social Justice: A Perspective from Johannesburg, by Oladele Ayorinde
11. Festival Futurity at the Palestine Music Expo, by David A. McDonald
12. “The Many Ways We Are Alike”: The Perils of Multiculturalism in Boise’s World Village Festival, by Kimberly J. Marshall & Steven Hatcher
13. Afterword: The Work That Music Festivals Do, by Eric Fillion & Ajay Heble
Popular Music Will Not Save Us
CAPITALISM AND MUSIC
EDUCATION
LAUREN K. RICHERME , Associate Professor of Music Education, Indiana University
In today’s globalized landscapes, both traditional and progressive K–12 music education practices, including those associated with popular music, can further capitalismrelated inequities. In this context, music educators and students might consider how they position themselves and their music-making practices in relation to capitalist aims and processes and confront the more unethical aspects of capitalism.
Popular Music Will Not Save Us challenges music educators to rethink their philosophical stances in the face of contemporary capitalist values and explores the intersection of music education and globalized capitalism, unveiling how certain practices exacerbate material inequities and erode social responsibility. As Richerme unravels the complexities of music education, her analysis sheds light on how prevalent practices can inadvertently uphold capitalist ideals and reinforce individualism, unceasing accumulation, and precarity in the workforce. Given that no musical genre inherently challenges problematic aspects of capitalism, Richerme proposes that music educators instead focus on affective flows, or the circulation of sensations within pedagogical spaces, and consider four alternative positionalities: thriving within, surviving under, resisting, and challenging capitalism.
Popular Music Will Not Save Us advocates for a shift away from capitalistic individualism and inequities and toward a more equitable, affective pedagogical mode. Now is the time to transcend traditional boundaries and embrace a new paradigm that prioritizes social impact over commercial gain.
Remixing the Classroom in Practice
STORIES FROM THE FIELD
EDITED BY MYA SCARLATO , Associate Professor of Music Education, Berklee College of Music; & SANNA KIVIJÄRVI , Transdisciplinary Researcher and Senior Lecturer, University of the Arts Helsinki and Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
DECEMBER 2025
240 PAGES • 6 X 9
World rights, all languages
“Remixing the Classroom” in Practice engages directly with Randall Allsup’s groundbreaking Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (IUP, 2016) by sharing what democratic, creative, and studentcentered approaches to music education look like when applied in the field.
Through narrative essays covering a spectrum of contexts, including piano studios, choir ensembles, pre-service teacher education, and digital music spaces, “Remixing the Classroom” in Practice explores how issues of music teacher quality are intertwined with ethical and moral considerations that are central to educational practice in any setting. The authors share a wide array of examples and stories of educators striving toward pluralistic understandings of open forms of music education practice and beginning to teach outside the frames offered by traditional institutions and approaches: moving away from the teacher-centered craft, breaking the master/ apprenticeship cycle, and drawing from student-initiated approaches. These stories touch on matters ranging from identity construction to patriotism and decolonization, analyzing and reframing implications for elementary and secondary schools, higher education, and other educational contexts within a diverse and ever-changing society.
Table of Contents
Foreword: A Short Prelude, by Randall Everett Allsup
1. Invitation: Enacting Open Philosophies of Music Education, by Mya Scarlato & Sanna Kivijärvi
2. Studiously Playful: Improvising in Piano Lessons—Pictures from a Learning Lab, by Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos & Niki Barachanou
3. Re-mixing and Re-presenting: The Busy Work of Race in Music Classrooms, by Yan Carlos Colón León
4. “An Official Letter of Reprimand”: Rethinking Instrumental Music Education Through Autoethnographic Inquiry, by Christopher T. F. Hanson
5. A Director, a Conductor, and a Teacher Walk into a Band Room, by Robert C. Jordan
6. Teaching for Openings in Adult Avocational Choral Spaces, by Robin J. Freeman
7. How Might Open Music Education Curriculum Nurture Subjectivity in Japanese Preservice Teachers?, by Naomi Katsura
8. The Messy Muddle of Enacting Open-Text Assessment in Music Teacher Education, by George Nicholson & Olivia Tucker
9. Remixing the U.S. National Anthem(s): Toward ‘Plastic’ Concepts of American Identity, by Mya Scarlato
Afterword: Navigating the Stories and their Key Contributions in the International Context of Music Education, by Sanna Kivijärvi & Mya Scarlato
Boise’s World Village Festival, by Kimberly J. Marshall & Steven Hatcher
13. Afterword: The Work That Music Festivals Do, by Eric Fillion & Ajay Heble
Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage
RITUAL, PERFORMANCE, AND BELONGING IN BURYAT COMMUNITIES OF SIBERIA
JOSEPH J. LONG , Honorary Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh; Research and Policy Lead, Scottish Autism
2025
304 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 23 B&W PHOTOS
• 3 MAPS • 1 B&W TABLE
World rights, all languages
In the mid-2000s, the Russian government began to merge Siberia’s smallest Indigenous territories into larger administrative regions. Among Buryat Mongols living to the west of Lake Baikal the state promoted a policy of “National Cultural Autonomy,” which sought to separate culture from territory amid this consolidation of land and people. Although public performances of Buryat culture were mobilized to show support for the policy, Long’s compelling ethnography provides alternative ways to understand the meanings attached to these displays. At the same time, the book documents how resurgent local rituals demonstrated enduring ties to the land.
Drawing on classic theories of ritual and performance, Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage explores how Buryat shamanism and state-sanctioned performing arts have allowed Buryats to negotiate and express different kinds of belonging to people and land. Based on several years of anthropological fieldwork in Western Buryat communities, this book provides new insights into the ways that these forms have influenced one another over time.
While Buryat experience has been fundamentally shaped by Soviet communism and its aftermath, Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage shows how this history parallels the experience of Indigenous peoples worldwide.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on transliteration, terminology, and style
Acronyms and abbreviations, groups and associations
Introduction
Mankhai, October 2005
1. Western Buryats in Context
2. Hospitality, Reciprocity, and Everyday Ritual
3. Kinship, Ritual, and Belonging in Western Buryat Communities
4. Constructing Culture, Framing Performance
5. Territorial Unification and National Cultural Autonomy in Cisbaikalia
6. Buryat Dance and the Aesthetics of Belonging
7. Institutionalized Shamanism and Ritual Change
8. Mankhai Revisited: Place-Making and Precedence after Territorial Autonomy
Conclusions, Returns, and Reflections
Bibliography
Index
Pathos and Praxis
AN INTEGRATED PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE
SCOTT DAVIDSON , Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Massachusetts Amherst
2025
248 PAGES • 6 X 9
World rights, all languages
Pathos and Praxis presents a new and original framework for an integrated phenomenology of life. It provides the first comparative study of two influential French philosophers, Paul Ricoeur and Michel Henry, and shows that their debates over the interpretation of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx signal two rival approaches to the phenomenology of life.
Davidson demonstrates that while Henry reveals the phenomenological meaning of life through an inward turn to a pure subjective feeling of being alive, Ricoeur anchors its significance in the reciprocal interaction between the self and the world. But these two alternatives are not necessarily opposed.
Pathos and Praxis proposes an integrated phenomenology of life to which both Henry and Ricoeur make an important contribution. To be a self is to suffer the pathos of “having a life” but also to be capable of engaging in the praxis of “leading a life.” By thinking the pathos and praxis of life together, the integrated approach preserves human agency against deterministic conceptions of life and at the same time avoids the meritocratic hubris that depicts one’s life solely as the result of one’s own doing. This integration of having and leading a life reframes our thinking about human capabilities and vulnerabilities in a way that has important implications for biopolitics and the ethics of life.
“Anyone interested in the philosophies of Ricœur and Henry will benefit from this thoroughly researched book. But Pathos and Praxis is more than a scholarly investigation. In it, Davidson introduces the idea of an integrated phenomenology of life which integrates both our internal feeling of being alive—pathos—and our power to engage with the external world—praxis. Because of this integration, Pathos and Praxis is major contribution to phenomenology and to philosophy in general.”
Leonard Lawlor, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University
On the Deities of Samothrace
F. W. J. SCHELLING
EDITED & TRANSLATED BY
ALEXANDER BILDA , Permanent Academic Staff Member, University of Freiburg; JASON M. WIRTH , Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University; & DAVID FARRELL KRELL , Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University; Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies, Brown University
2025
336 PAGES • 6 X 9 • 30 B&W PHOTOS
• 2 LINE DRAWINGS
World rights, all languages
In 1815, F. W. J. Schelling presented a lecture titled “On the Deities of Samothrace” to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The lecture offered a startlingly original reading of the ancient Greek mystery religion on the island of Samothrace. It would be the last book Schelling himself published, and it is the key to his influential Philosophy of Mythology.
Now, for the first time in English, this critical edition contains the entirety of Schelling’s original text, including the lecture itself, Schelling’s afterword, and all his extensive philosophical and philological endnotes. It also offers copious explanatory notes, photographs and maps of the site, and three interpretive essays by the editors and translators elucidating Schelling’s text for contemporary readers.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was an influential German philosopher. A student of Fichte and a contemporary of Hegel, Schelling’s work was instrumental in the development of German idealism.
“An excellent translation of a challenging but important text. The notes are extremely helpful for the reader in navigating Schelling’s extensive (and often obscure) references in multiple languages. The commentary clearly reflects extensive research and is a substantial contribution to Schelling scholarship. Finally, the essays provide useful historical background and provocative commentary that help the reader interpret the text philosophically. Without question, an impressive achievement.”
Mark J. Thomas, author of Freedom and Ground: A Study of Schelling’s Treatise on Freedom
New in 2026!
Selected forthcoming titles from Indiana University Press
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